Quotessence
Home / Topics / Sentimentalism Quotes

Sentimentalism Quotes

Browse 21 quotes about Sentimentalism.

Sentimentalism Quotes

“It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about “a law” that he has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds lay and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.”

ColdLogicRationalFairyMaterialismMysticismCoolSentimentalism
Book:Orthodoxy
Create image

“The scandal of the end of the world will not occur, for the very good reason that existence has already been judged and declared unjustifiable. This world must thus be considered the only one there'll ever be, the verdict immanent, injustice irremediable. This has nothing to do with the natural tendency of things but rather with the bestial ethic smouldering in the labyrinthine entrails of human beings, which requires that the just be separated from the unjust, the good from the bad, so that the truest, stupidest and most sentimental order may triumph. In fact there is no need to wait. Let the stupidest things triumph, that is the Last Judgement. When you have lumbago, you have to move like a reptile. You have to get through your movement before the muscle has had time to feel pain. It is the same with ideas and language. You have to have got to the end of the sentence, before language has had time to feel pain.”

PainFateStupidityMoralsEnd Of The WorldSentimentalism
Book:Cool memories
Create image

“I long to get away, sometimes, from my own generation. I don't care whether it's into the past, or into the future, so long as it's away from the patter into simple realities again. I hate being a slave to my own age. ... We are so afraid of sentimentality that we're losing the power of human feeling. Our writers today understand all the brutalities and cynicisms; but how many of them understand the simple human affections that hold decent human beings together and make the world worth living in?”

HumanismLiberalismModernismConventionalityConformismSentimentalism
Book:The Sun Cure
Create image

“I spend the next few days watching Maï die. I can't stand that voice, that protest. Katzenelenbogen shows up and explains in that rational, no-nonsense, doctoral tone that no one has the right to make such a fuss over a cat, while the whole world. . . . . I kick them out, both him and the world. Maï is no longer a cat. She is a human being in agony. Every living thing that suffers is a human being. She is cuddled in my arms, a small ball of lackluster fur, which gives her a horrible stuffed air already smacking of taxidermists. Every now and then she raises her head, looks at me inquiringly and miaows a question I understand, but am unable to answer. Our vocal cords are totally inadequate there. What goings-on about a mere cat, huh? I hate your guts, you antisentimental, antiemotional, hardheaded rationalists. You are the ones who have raised the going rate of sensitivity. You have put all your emphasis on ideas, and ideas without "emotions" and without "sentimentalism," that's the world you have built, your work. All the pseudo-people who have the Nazi arrogance to be reading this book make my hands ache for a grenade.”

DeathSufferingEmotionsSensitivityRationalismSentimentalism
Book:White Dog
Create image

“The effect of that was startling. Tears came into his son’s eyes. Silently, the young man shook his hand. Afterward—after the interview was over— Marin thought, What kind of future will we have, with an entire generation of over-emotional young people just now coming of age? He visualized future groups filled with adults who had been virtually fatherless in their childhood and youth—tearful people by the million influencing the pattern of group law on the basis of their own inner need for the missing male parent. Was that a true picture? he wondered. If it were, it did not augur well for the future of the land. While he waited for take-off time, he found himself uneasy and unhappy. The fact was he didn’t know what had been happening during his absence. They would unquestionably have turned on the pain circuit, the moment they discovered the connection between Trask and Group 814. The area covered would gradually be extended; better get drugs he could take when the rocket ship landed. He’d stand the pain until his arrival. He didn’t wish to appear doped before the officers who would meet him. As it turned out, the ship was already past the apex of its climb when, abruptly, he felt the stab of pain through his shoulder. As he silently fought the agony, one thing was clear to Marin: the crisis had arrived.”

CrisisSimulationBoomersMillenialsSentimentalismFather FiguresOver Emotive
Book:The Mind Cage
Create image

“Mystical organizations are only a crystallization of facts which can be found, in a more diffuse and less tangible form, in all strata of people. The degree of mystical, sentimental and sadistic feelings corresponds exactly to the degree of the disturbance of natural orgastic experience. Close observation of the audience of a trashy thriller or of a boxing match teaches more about these problems than a hundred handbooks of sexology.”

SexualityMysticismThrillersSadismBoxing MatchesSentimentalismSexologyDisturbances
Book:The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Create image

“Very often, those who express concern about (or even interest in) the conditions in which farmed animals are raised are disregarded as sentimentalists. But it’s worth taking a step back to ask who is the sentimentalist and who is the realist. […] Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” and orders it. The other says “I’m in the mood for a burger,” but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?”

VeganismSentimentalismSentimentalistVegetarinism
Author:Jonathon Safran Foer
Create image

“We must distinguish between "sentimental" and "sensitive." A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother's Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata. A whole century of authors praised the simple life of the poor, and so on. Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoevski, we mean the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.”

Sentimentalism
Book:Lectures on Russian Literature
Create image

“A writer observes. A writer records for posterity. The moments in the transience of the labyrinth of time that would go unrecorded otherwise! A writer records for value. A writer records for sentimentalism. A writer tries in earnest to carry the emotions and sentiments that make us what we ultimately are. For what are we? Empty spaces in an atom!”

WritingWriterAtomsWriting ProcessWriters And WritingWriting PhilosophyWriting InspirationSentimentalismWhy I WriteEmpty Spaces
Author:Avijeet Das
Create image

“It is not without good reason that the literary tradition of pastoral poetry can look back on an almost uninterrupted history of over two thousand years since its beginnings in Hellenism. With the exception of the early Middle Ages, when urban and court culture was extinguished, there have been variants of this poetry in every century. Apart from the thematic material of the novel of chivalry, there is probably no other subject-matter 15 that has occupied the literature of Western Europe for so long and maintained itself against the assaults of rationalism with such tenacity. This long and uninterrupted reign shows that ‘sentimental’ poetry, in Schiller’s sense of the word, plays an incomparably greater part in the history of literature than ‘naïve’ poetry. Even the idylls of Theocritus himself owe their existence not, as might be imagined, to genuine roots in nature and a direct relationship to the life of the common people, but to a reflective feeling for nature and a romantic conception of the common folk, that is, to sentiments which have their origin in a yearning for the remote, the strange and the exotic. The peasant and the shepherd are not enthusiastic about their surroundings or about their daily work. And interest in the life of the simple folk is, as we know, to be sought neither in spatial nor social proximity to the peasantry; it does not arise in the folk itself but in the higher classes, and not in the country but in the big towns and at the courts, in the midst of bustling life and an over-civilized, surfeited society. Even when Theocritus was writing his idylls, the pastoral theme and situation were certainly no longer a novelty; it will already have occurred in the poetry of the primitive pastoral peoples, but doubtless without the note of sentimentality and complacency, and probably also without attempting to describe the outward conditions of the shepherd’s life realistically. Pastoral scenes, although without the lyrical touch of the Idylls, were to be found before Theocritus, at any rate, in the mime. They are a matter of course in the satyr plays, and rural scenes are not unknown even to tragedy. But pastoral scenes and pictures of country life are not enough to produce bucolic poetry; the preconditions for this are, above all, the latent conflict of town and country and the feeling of discomfort with civilization.”

RealityCivilizationSentimentalismPastoral
Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
Create image